Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating in a live On Air a little bit easier.

Up until now you haven’t been able to do anything other than watch the live broadcast as it happens, which is nice until you have to run to the kitchen to grab a drink or pause to take a phone call. Today, viewers can now rewind your broadcast no matter where they are during the live filming process.

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

The only negatives that I see to this is that it slows down the ramp up time it takes to start your broadcast, so you should buffer some time in to get started before your actual scheduled “live” time:

Other tweaks in this push include higher quality versions of a Hangout On Air via your mobile device, which is nice since these can be kind of grainy, depending on your connection at the time. Additionally, live broadcasts will now start without having to refresh a page, which was a real pain in the ass. Now if you visit a page that has the embedded On Air player, it will just automagically start playing.

The Hangouts product has made its way into many of Google’s services, including its mobile offerings on Android and even Glass. The usecase for Hangouts widely vary, but Google has been dogfeeding it way before its release. The “On Air” option has the attention of both local and national broadcasters, giving them away to connect to audiences in a way more intimate way.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today marks the latest step in Aereo’s legal battle with major broadcast networks like Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC, with the live TV streaming/DVR service filing a declaratory judgement action against CBS, in particular.

The company is asking that the court prevent CBS from suing Aereo in every district to which it expands, as CBS has twice threatened to sue Aereo in Boston, where it will launch on May 15.

After losing a preliminary injunction in the Second Circuit of New York, the major broadcast networks have been eyeing other routes to shut down the fledgling TV startup, which rents out mini-antennas to its users to watch live or recorded television from thirty OTA broadcast channels on any device.

It’s shaking up the way we think about TV, and the broadcast networks aren’t pleased.

The major court battle is still underway after the favorable ruling for Aereo with the preliminary injunction, and meanwhile Aereo continues to expand. The service is headed to Boston on May 15, and this has prompted quite the reaction from CBS.

Les Moonves, CBS CEO, said on stage last week that CBS would consider going to cable if it couldn’t shut down Aereo in the courtroom. He also threatened to continue going after them in the courts.

This follows a similar threat from Fox, wherein NewsCorp went so far as to send out a press release threatening to go to cable if it didn’t get its way in court.

And before that, a PR representative for CBS tweeted this in response to Aereo’s expansion into Boston.

@RichBTIG We will sue, and stealing our signal will be found to be illegal in Boston, just as it will be everywhere else.—
Dana McClintock (@Dana_McClintock) April 23, 2013

Here’s what Aereo’s spokesperson, Virginia Lam, had to say about it:

In response to the CBS companies’ repeated threats to sue Aereo in every market that it enters, Aereo today filed a declaratory judgment action in New York naming CBS, its Boston affiliates and its wholly owned and operated companies located in Aereo’s initial expansion markets. In 2012, CBS and other broadcasters chose to file copyright lawsuits against Aereo in the federal courts in New York. Last year, the trial court denied CBS’s and the other broadcasters’ request for a preliminary injunction against Aereo; and, last month, the appeals court affirmed that decision. The fact that CBS did not prevail in their efforts to enjoin Aereo in their existing federal lawsuit does not entitle them to a do-over in another jurisdiction. We are hopeful that any such efforts to commence duplicative lawsuits to try to seek a different outcome will be rejected by the courts.

The filing names CBS as well as their owned and operated affiliates, and covers expansion cities. The complaint argues that a decision was already made by the Second Circuit that Aereo was not guilty of infringement and should not be shut down with a preliminary injunction. Therefore, “following” Aereo around the nation as it expands and leveling the same action against them from court to court would be “improper,” according to Aereo.

In the end, these rulings will define the success – or failure – of Aereo and could ultimately a battle of the wallets as litigation grows and becomes more expensive.

Here’s the full filing:

Aereo Complaint for Declaratory Judgment – FINAL FILED

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video isn’t just on the desktop anymore, as viewers increasingly find themselves watching on mobile phones and tablets. To meet that demand, social video startup Spreecast is now available on more devices and platforms, with the launch of an iPhone app and streaming via mobile web.

Spreecast has a platform that allows users to broadcast live streaming video together. The idea is to provide a way for broadcasters to easily interact with each other, and tools which enable them to communicate directly with viewers who are tuning in, and enabling them to join the broadcast as well.

To date, most of that interaction has happened in PC-based browsers, where viewers could watch streams, chat with broadcasters, and pose questions to them either by text or video. Viewers can also share what they’re watching on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. The player is viewable both on the Spreecast site itself, as well as an embeddable player on partner sites.

But the company is making a big push to make its broadcasts available on mobile devices. To that end, it’s just released a native iPhone application, as well as mobile web capabilities for streaming on iOS and Android phones and tablets. The new capabilities will allow users to stream Spreecast videos in their mobile web browsers via HTML5, increasing potential viewership of users on the go.

Its iPhone app goes a step further, with a lot more functionality for viewers. They can not only watch streams, but also participate via text chat. Users will also have social sharing features available. While not in the current iPhone build, Spreecast plans to build capabilities that would allow iPhone users to also broadcast from their own mobile phones. In the next few months, it also expects to roll out Android mobile phone and tablet apps.

That’ll provide greater potential for partners using the platform to reach audiences, regardless of the device they’re using. Media companies like Viacom, Disney, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times leverage Spreecast for their broadcasts as a way to interact with viewers and provide context around current events.

Spreecast was founded by StubHub co-founder and investor Jeff Fluhr back in 2011. Since then, it’s raised $11 million in funding from investors that include Meakem Becker Venture Capital, GGV Capital, and MentorTech Ventures, among others. The startup, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has about 20 employees.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in February, we introduced you about EvntLive, a new startup backed by Silicon Valley veterans that’s on a mission to create a scalable platform for broadcasting live concerts, from arenas to small clubs, backed by a library of recorded shows, profiles and music info. Of course, a platform for live concerts isn’t exactly a new idea. In fact, it’s been floating around for years, but those entering the space have been hamstrung to an over-abundance of friction stemming from royalty and licensing issues and having to convince venues to install the technology and hardware — among other things. As a result, live online music has been slow to take off.

But the EvntLive founders see a new music industry beginning to emerge, in which the new scale of online consumption and distribution channels now allow artists to tap into much larger audiences. In turn, with digital music moving towards free, artists now make most of their money from touring, but because they can only tour so much and play so many venues, the access to new audiences and ticket sales afforded by a live, online platform is becoming more appealing.

EvntLive isn’t the only startup looking to capitalize on this shift. While it remains in private beta, services like Concert Window, StageIt and Qello are live and finding traction. Concert Window co-founder Dan Gurney tells us that the startup is beginning to hit its stride, having quadrupled revenue over the last five months, added a handful of employees and is now broadcasting over 100 live shows each month.

The startup has been able to do by broadcasting live concerts over the Web, allowing you to listen and watch as the concert happens from the comfort of your couch. To address the friction for venues mentioned above, Concert Window attempts to take the work out of the hands of venue managers — all the venue needs is an Internet connection.

The startup provides the equipment, camera and cables, and its system controls the broadcast remotely, so, after the initial setup, venues can just kick back and stream whenever they please. No production team required.

On the user experience end, Concert Window has done its best to keep online ticket prices low (under $10, depending on the concert), and distributes two-thirds of ticket sales to the venue and artist, making it a comparable revenue split to iTunes and app stores. Both the video and audio quality are high, which is a must for online concert services, and if you have a good sound system and are lazy like I am, it almost beats being there in person. By addressing these barriers, Concert Window has been able to stream 2,000 concerts with 1,500+ artists at 15 partner venues to date. To really make a dent, it will be key to offer more selection, but it’s a pretty good start.

From the beginning, Concert Window has dealt with licensing and rights hurdles by focusing exclusively on livestreaming, rather than offering both streaming and archiving. This leaves a gap in the experience, and down the road, the startup that takes the cake in this space is going to do both (and do both on mobile), but it will be a long, uphill battle to work out all the minutia with rights holders.

Since launching last fall, Concert Window has been focused on building relationships with venues and artists, meaning that design and its UI have taken a backseat. But, today, the startup officially launched a platform-wide redesign and new branding. The startup now offers an HTML5-compatible site, allowing viewers to tap into what it claims is the largest concert volume of any live music platform from their computer, smartphone or tablet.

By offering a mobile experience, a relatively steady stream of concerts and allowing fans to chat with each other and leave feedback for artists, Concert Window hopes its v2.0 can give it a leg up on the competition.

Find Concert Window at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

An ominous “nuclear option” looms over the TV-loving American public if Fox and other broadcasters follow through with a threat to pull out of the public airwaves in response to Aereo, a brazen startup that streams TV signals online without paying providers. News reports are describing this as a “threat,” which, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an expression of intention to inflict evil, injury, or damage.”

So let’s imagine that this high-unlikely bluff actually materializes. What kind of “evil” would befall the 14 percent of antenna-based TV viewers if they were deprived of such high-quality programming? Here’s a list of some of the best and worst shows over the last few decades:

1. Work It (2012)

Described lovingly as a program that “could be the worst television show in history,” Work It follows the cross-dressing antics of two men who disguise themselves as women, based on the evidently false premise that females are more employable in a recession. In the Work It universe, womanhood is a 24-hour vanity themed existence, hopping from eating disorders to discrimination to self-exploitation — all in a day. Nothing makes inequality and anorexia as enjoyable as laugh track.

2. Mr. Personality (2003)

What’s better than desecrating the sacred institution of marriage in the depravity-demanding script of a reality TV show? Giving a platform to a woman at the center of possibly the most embarrassing political scandal in a century. In Mr. Personality, Monica Lewinsky–yes, that Monica Lewinsky, plays host to an attention-starved bachelorette, as a dozen masked men attempt to woo her into holy matrimony in the romantic time-span of a TV season.

3. The Swan (2004)

Nothing promotes America’s healthy gender attitudes like a show that rewards contestants for surgically altering their appearance for the approval of millions of strangers. A team of coaches, therapists, surgeons and dentists literally create the soul-sucking contest of a beauty pageant out of thin broadcast air. The goal of The Swan, apparently, is to turn back the feminist clock to a time when we encouraged girls to look and, more importantly, think, like Barbie.

Thoughtful readers might point out that canceled shows don’t fairly represent the richest offerings of the broadcast menu. What about the wildly popular shows?

4. Dancing With The Stars (Current)

Childhood stars and scandal-ridden personalities cha-cha their way to attention heaven in a competition-reality show based on the premise that talent and moral bankruptcy can be overlooked in exchange for a few giggles. Watch Former Republican House Majority Leader and convicted felon Tom Delay samba his way into public forgiveness in a wholly ironic American flag pantsuit.

Threat Re-Assessed

In short, let us hope that broadcasters pull out of the airwaves. As a humble Midwestern boy who absorbed enough television radiation to sprout a unicorn, I saw first-hand how TV congeals an entire population into glaze-eyed humpbacks. It, quite literally, causes obesity, attention deficit, and a litany of sedentary-lifestyle disorders. The only threat I see is that someone will pick up a book.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s first trial to use the unused channels in the broadcast TV spectrum to provide wireless broadband access launched in 2010 in Logan, Ohio. Since then, Google has shown a lot of interest in this topic and today it is launching its second trial. This time it is in Cape Town, South Africa, where Google partnered with a number of local organizations to connect 10 schools to the new wireless broadband network. The idea behind the trial, Google says, is “to show that broadband can be offered over white spaces without interfering with licensed spectrum holders.”

To get this new network off the ground, Google partnered with the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET), CSIR Meraka, e-Schools Network, the Wireless Access Provider’s Association of South Africa and Comsol Wireless Solutions. The partners, TENET writes in its announcement today, will “periodically update ICASA, Sentech, the Joint Spectrum Advisory Group, broadcasters and other constituents on trial outcomes, including spectrum measurements and reported interference.”

Using these unused TV channels, Google argues, “has the advantage that low frequency signals can travel longer distances. The technology is well-suited to provide low cost connectivity to rural communities with poor telecommunications infrastructure, and for expanding coverage of wireless broadband in densely populated urban areas.”

The network will use a local version of Google’s spectrum database. Google launched the public trial of the U.S. version with the FCC in the U.S. earlier this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CBS is today introducing a new iOS application for iPad and iPhone, which brings its television programming to mobile devices, offering full episodes for streaming a week after they originally air. Shows that air daily, including daytime and late-night programs, will be available 24 hours after airing, the network says.

The company also adds that it plans to expand this application to support both the Android and Windows 8 platforms later this year.

The new app offers many, but not all, of CBS’s top television shows. The company notes that the app will offer NCIS, The Good Wife, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, How I Met Your Mother, The Young and The Restless, The Late Show With David Letterman, Survivor, Elementary, and others. But some of CBS’s leading properties, including The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist, are not available.

In addition, unlike streaming TV content often found on services like Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Video, for instance, CBS’s app is designed primarily to allow users to catch up on an episode they missed – it’s not offering all the episodes from a current season, or from seasons past.

The app will also offer viewers a social experience, starting with the launch of the Fall TV season later this year. At that time, the company will integrate social feeds, live events where fans can engage with CBS talent directly, and other second-screen experiences specifically for shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, Hawaii Five-O and NCIS: Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, users are able to personalize the app by creating a section of their favorite shows. They can tweet about the show or share to Facebook from the app, as well, or join in discussions with other viewers.

“Our online viewers not only want to watch their favorite shows on multiple devices, they want deeper engagement with the programs they love,” said Jim Lanzone, President of CBS Interactive in a release. “The new CBS App gives them the best of both worlds, letting people watch CBS shows on the best screen available for them, with a host of extra features that give them a richer viewing experience whenever and wherever they tune in.”

Notably, the move also allows for a new way for CBS to generate ad dollars for its content, as the app is offering ad-supported, or “sponsored,” programming. At launch, Buick will be CBS’s first partner on these efforts, whose participation means there will be reduced commercial breaks, as compared with traditional TV for the first several weeks after launch.

“We have been methodically and strategically finding new ways to satiate the appetite for our content on new platforms, while tapping into the tremendous revenue provided by doing so,” said Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of CBS Corporation. “Our announcement today achieves both of these objectives, while protecting our very healthy current ecosystem.”

CBS is the last network to launch some sort of streaming TV experience of its own on mobile devices. ABC has its ABC Player app, NBC has an app, and Fox has Fox Now. They all offer varying degrees of access to their television content, but none provide complete lineups of what the network has to offer.

CBS has been moving to bring its TV content to streaming services in recent months. In November, the company finally signed a deal with Hulu after years of remaining the broadcast holdout on the service. Like this new app, the Hulu deal didn’t include access to some of the network’s most popular shows, like Big Bang Theory, which remains difficult to watch on mobile devices (as is the point, apparently). However, this and many other top shows are available for streaming from the CBS.com homepage.

The company also signed an expanded deal with Amazon this February, bringing a handful of new properties, including America’s Next Top Model, Everybody Loves Raymond, Jericho, The L Word, Undercover Boss, and United States of Tara to Amazon’s Instant Video platform. Amazon and CBS previously had an agreement that offered users access to some new and much back-catalog content, including things like Star Trek, Frasier, Medium and Cheers. It also struck a minor deal with Yahoo to bring entertainment programming to Yahoo’s online property omg!.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

About a month ago, if you’ll remember, the very fabric of the Internet journalism game was rent asunder when CNET’s parent company, CBS, refused to let it write about the Dish Hopper with Slingbox, a DVR with a system to view your shows remotely built in. More important, however, is the Hopper’s ability to “hop” past commercials in prime-time TV a few days after the show aired, allowing you to, say, blow past the commercials in Modern Family while managing a two-handed bong. It is, as they say, indistinguishable from magic.

I had a bit of time with the Hopper and I’m pleased to report that it is, in fact, one of the best DVRs you can get and arguably the best television provider DVRs I’ve used, barring my experience with TiVo-enabled devices. Here’s my take.

The Hopper is focused around the DVR and Guide menus. The interface is fast and processing time when you select a movie to record or prepare a scheduled recording time is snappy – even faster than the original Hopper. The unit has Wi-Fi built in as well as a 1.3GHz processor, which makes network features like the Blockbuster and on-demand video apps much faster.

The device also has a 2 terabyte hard drive, apparently the largest in the pay-TV industry, and thanks to Primetime Anytime, Dish’s prime-time recording service, you can easily grab all prime time content and still have plenty of room for movies and recorded TV. Playback is equally smooth and, in urban Brooklyn, Dish has only “gone down” once during a brief period during Hurricane Sandy.

What’s really interesting, however, is the Dish Anywhere feature. This allows you to view your content on almost any device, including Android and iOS. You can prepare content for mobile when you select it for recording. This is a 1-to-1 process (an hour of video takes an hour to process) but you can then transfer that video over to your device using an iPad-only app called Hopper Transfers. This allows for offline viewing.

In short, then, all of these features turn the traditional Dish DVR into a more computer/mobile centered device. Without saying much of anything out loud, CBS’s reaction to this product speaks volumes. For example, if you were a fan of Game Of Thrones and wanted to watch it on the go, you could easily use this to watch recorded episodes in your hotel room or offline on the plane. While this is nothing new – Slingbox users and pirates have been doing this for years – in the sclerotic pay-TV industry this is akin to witchcraft.

Was this device worth all the fuss and attention thrown at it? Sure. It disrupts the broadcast model considerably by essentially picking out all the good stuff on major primetime networks and serving it up to viewers on a silver platter. CBS is worried that people who watch CBS will use the Hopper’s commercial hopping feature to blow past ads for McDonald’s and Ford (they definitely will) yet they don’t realize that this process, thanks to the DVR, is already out of their hands. If Dish’s commercial skipping didn’t exist, I’d just blow past the commercials anyway. There’s literally no way for them to stop it.

The best feature of this DVR isn’t the clock speed or huge hard drive. It’s that the clock speed is being used to power a very powerful web-based interface with the user. While the Hopper’s guide looks primitive in the browser, it is immensely useful. Playback is rock solid on a good network connection and the ability to use Primetime Anywhere to catch up on shows you may have missed while traveling is amazing. In short, this thing did deserve best of CES and CBS was stupid to try to hush up CNET. They may not like the product, but it’s about to eat their lunch and it’s better to get behind the marauding technology than be bowled over in front of it.

The current generation of TV watchers understands devices like Slingbox implicitly and appreciates commercial-skipping. While the networks can’t be faulted for hoping that a few people will accidentally not skip through a peanut butter commercial, the possibility of that happening is slim to none. They can keep people from skipping commercials by producing content that is so compelling that you have to watch it “live.” That’s the bottom line.

To attack this box for doing what humans do naturally is silly at best and destructive at worst. In the end, all the legal futzing in the world won’t change the fact that the way we use our televisions has changed drastically.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To absolutely no surprise, the people I know are enamored of Google Glasses. The world of sensor-driven big data is sure to come, just as apps have supplanted sites as the metaphor with which we frame our lives. As one who replaced music with computers, I am eager for the next phase.

But while Glass forages ahead in mind share, my thoughts slide to the elegant footnote that is increasingly absorbing my interest. The iPad Mini, a device I only bought because I couldn’t quite rule out something lurking there, so subtle that I can really only see it in the absence of something. As I’ve lived with this strange step-child, that something is taking shape, becoming visible and tangible.

Just as Glass captures our imagination, the Mini absorbs our reality. Always present, just big enough to transfer much of the iPhone’s work load, barely big enough to suck the Retina iPad dry, and just waiting to use AirPlay to push toward the big screen for media. Waiting not for the tech but the politics of the death of the broadcast windowing business and the rise of streaming to sort itself out.

With so many cycles opting for the Mini, our behavior is shifting. This is bigger than big data, because the compressed signal of behavior moves ahead of the raw data in identifying the underlying sentiment. It’s not analysis, it’s the feel in musical terms. It’s that rush we felt the first time, and every time, we heard the Stones’ Last Time. It’s not the riff, although that was plenty for starters, it wasn’t the lyric either, it wasn’t any of the parts but for sure it just felt good.

There’s some of that in the Glass video too, the moments where you can extrapolate what will happen when we can dive into an event and feel it because so many people are running it that we can cut to just the right person at just the right angle both in image and sound. Groups will form like the Beatles in Hamburg where the band got so tight they just simply started making music greater than the sum of its parts.

When people start finding the value, the joy, in working together, now that is something big. RIght now, we can’t quite see it, but these new tools are like the electric guitar, the Arriflex in movies, Netflix in the changing of the guard. Each of them produced a state of being where magic could happen. Only now years later can I hear what the British musicians heard when they heard the blues masters. It was there all the time, I just didn’t listen. Lightweight cameras birthed the French New Wave, freeing Truffaut and Godard to deconstruct the studio system into its essential elements of story and naturalism.

We don’t yet see Netflix for what it is, intuiting that ethereal something but getting lost in irrelevant cord cutting and cartel stonewalling. But here it is: just like the Beatles and their compatriots dismantled the existing music business and took over both the means of production and then distribution, so too will the next wave take over this live streaming cloud-based network and produce live push notification-driven events owned and created by the artists themselves.

You can begin to feel the power of this moment with the Mini. It’s small enough to always be there, big enough to get work and research done, Bluetooth enabled to add a keyboard as I’m doing right now to write this, enough battery to manage notifications, news, Spotify, Chatter, AirPlay, everything. It’s the hub, and Glass will work with it because it needs to. When Jobs said he’d cracked the code, I believed it. It wasn’t bravado; he just ran out of time. And when I finally settled into the Mini, I began to see how.

The Mini is hard to write to. It may be because I’m sick of the tricks, or the usual kerfuffles, or whatever. But the Mini reeks of just enough, no fluff. What is annoying and dumbed down on the Retina, like Pages, is plenty good enough with the keyboard. I don’t know what will happen with the Logitech mini keyboard, if MG is to be believed that it may be too small. But if I can make it work, it will be the first non-Apple Smart Cover I’ve bought. Already I can see the Bluetooth rules engine choosing keyboards based on location, priority, and all those intangibles that govern the studio recording process. How far behind is the atomization of the MacBook Air via the Bluetooth console?

The Mini turns my iPhone into the Pebble, at least until or unless Apple jumps in. With notifications turned on, Twitter and increasingly Facebook are draining the battery and pushing me even more toward the Mini. And it’s made Facetime an increasingly valuable choice where the Retina is too big and way too heavy. Glass may move in here as well as a Bluetooth Mini accessory. They’ll need to spend significant search bucks to subsidize Glass or risk being beaten by Apple on price.

Meanwhile event television is testing the streaming waters as the Mini melds controller, point of sale terminal, and notification multiplexing. Broadcast and cable politics mandate blocking of Netflix over AirPlay for the moment, but when I can’t watch Episode 4 and whatever of House of Cards through Apple TV, I opt for the Mini and out of Showtime or NBC. The one thing I have a finite amount of is viewing time, and the more Netflix wins in that arena, the more pressure is on the hotel to participate via AirPlay and get a cut. Watch for the weaker news channels like MSNBC cracking the code first.

I spent the weekend in a hotel in New York hacking into HDMI2 with the Mini and and a new Apple TV. The more I butted up against the roadblocks, the more I realized how Apple is partnering with companies like Netflix and Spotify rather than fighting. Being on HDMI2 made it difficult to watch shows on the hotel broadcast channels, but I could Slingbox in to California and watch on three hours later or Comcast on demand or buy on iTunes the next day. I could listen to three tracks off Boz Scaggs’ new record on Spotify and then buy it on iTunes for the full album.

The network fare suffers greatly when matched against House of Cards or the relentless advance of time-shifting. I’ve stopped recording Glee because I know it will be on Netflix when the season’s over, and besides how can it compete against a steady stream of 13 week “seasons from the streamers. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, House of Cards II, these things are stacked up over Gotham in relentless fashion. Just as the Beatles moved the record business from singles to albums and went to yearly production and release patterns, these binge streaming series are wiping out the weakened networks. Unless they buy in like AT&T did with the iPhone.

Sure, there’s a second screen these days. But it’s not the one you might think. The second screen is the TV, where the decaying rules remain in force as network comedies atrophy and the fall season is rife with cancellation. The first screen is the Mini, managing the push notification appointment calendar and relationships of the binge viewers as they kibitz, joke, and narrate the stream economy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Continuing its rapid-fire addition of new content deals, Amazon announced today that it has signed an agreement with CBS which will bring the forthcoming summer TV series “Under the Dome,” based on a best-selling Stephen King novel, to Amazon’s Prime Instant Video. This deal is unusual because it allows Amazon Prime members to stream all the series’ episodes four days after their initial broadcast, instead of 24 hours afterwards, as was previously speculated.

That makes the new agreement for “Under the Dome” notable – it’s a hint that CBS is at least willing to experiment with streaming an ongoing, broadcast series, even if it’s not offering day after viewing.

“With this innovative agreement, we’re giving fans more options to watch and stay current with this serialized series, and doing so in a way that protects the Television Network’s C3 advertising window,” Scott Koondel, Chief Corporate Content Licensing Officer at CBS, explained in a statement.

The statement indicates that CBS is hesitant to embrace any service that could impact its TV audience viewership metrics.

However, as Hollywood Reporter notes, CBS had ordered 13 episodes of the series in November, under an innovative financing structure which had the network seeking a video-on-demand partner from the start. The arrangement made it financially feasible to produce a high-end, scripted show at lower license fees, the report explains.

The show, produced by CBS and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, tells the story of a small New England town that is suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an enormous transparent dome. The network premiere takes place on June 24, 2013. It will then be free for Amazon Prime subscribers four days after airing, and can be streamed on users’ iOS devices, Kindle Fire HD, game consoles, and elsewhere.

The move comes shortly after another major win for Amazon, which will also soon become the exclusive online subscription home for PBS hit Downtown Abbey, which will begin offering streams of Season 3 on June 18, 2013.

Also of note, CBS signed a deal with Hulu in November after years of remaining the broadcast holdout on the service. But in its initial stages, that deal is very basic. It doesn’t include current, popular shows like “Big Bang Theory,” for example, but instead brings content from the network’s back catalog like Star Trek, I Love Lucy, and The Twilight Zone. There are now more than 2,600 episodes of CBS shows available on Hulu, but the only currently broadcast show was “Entertainment Tonight.“

CBS and Amazon first signed a content agreement back in summer 2011, which saw 18 CBS shows offered to Amazon’s Prime network.

It’s interesting that Amazon won the rights to the new series, instead of Hulu, where the deal could have served to expand CBS’s Hulu user base, or Netflix, whose bread-and-butter still includes content sourced from networks and studios. But according to Koondel, Amazon’s unique user base is what sealed the deal, as Amazon users may have also been readers of the King novel.

“Amazon has the distinct combination of having a terrific video service with a huge fan base among their customers for Stephen King’s book, making them the perfect partner for this summer programming event,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch